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Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Structural Disadvantage and Crime: White, Black, and Hispanic Comparisons*
Author(s) -
Ulmer Jeffery T.,
Harris Casey T.,
Steffensmeier Darrell
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
social science quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.482
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1540-6237
pISSN - 0038-4941
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2012.00868.x
Subject(s) - disadvantage , ethnic group , poverty , race (biology) , homicide , structural inequality , criminology , violent crime , inequality , demographic economics , demography , poison control , geography , psychology , sociology , political science , injury prevention , economics , gender studies , medicine , environmental health , mathematical analysis , mathematics , anthropology , law
Objectives The objective of this study is to advance knowledge on racial/ethnic disparities in violence and the structural sources of those disparities. We do so by extending scarce and limited research exploring the relationship between race/ethnic gaps in disadvantage and differences in violent crime across groups. Methods Using census place‐level data from C alifornia and N ew Y ork, we construct white, black, and Hispanic “gap” measures that take as a given the existence of disparities across race/ethnic groups in structural disadvantage and crime and subsequently utilize seemingly unrelated regression models to assess the extent to which gaps in disadvantage are predictive of gaps in homicide and index violence. Results Our results suggest that (1) there is considerable heterogeneity in the size of white–black, white–Hispanic, and black–Hispanic gaps in structural disadvantage and crime and (2) that race/ethnic disparities in structural disadvantage, particularly poverty and female headship, are positively associated with race/ethnic gaps in homicide and index violence. Conclusion In light of recent scholarship on the racial invariance hypothesis and on the relationship between structural inequality and crime, the current study demonstrates that disparities in disadvantage, particularly family structure and poverty, are important in driving racial and ethnic disparities in crime.